However, it’s a name I associate not only with David Fenton, a Friend of Gelbspan’s for likely obvious reasons, but also with Kalee Kreider – hold that thought for a few moments. So when I simply dropped the one word “Kalee” into the search, it turned up a short email she sent directly to Podesta:

Date: 2014-07-23 13:42
Subject: UN Summit and POTUS

Dear John,

Confidentially, I just spent a half day at the UN has part of my work with the UN Foundation on the Climate Summit.
Some of the Secretary-General’s team are telling people that POTUS will attend the Summit.
It is beginning to build expectations.
I have not heard the same thing coming from your side. Just wanted to flag it for you as you are aware of all the moving pieces.
Hope that this is helpful,
All my best,
Kalee

Aside: Kalee Kreider, for those newer readers now arriving at this blog, is one of the people at what I term the epicenter of the smear of skeptic climate scientists, she was the long-time spokesperson for Al Gore who worked at Fenton Communications not only before she worked for Gore, as she onlydiscloses here, (full LinkedIn resumé text here) but also after she worked for Gore, which we are told about here (full text here).

A search of her gmail address — which is now not a breach of any privacy on my part — seen in the July 2014 Podesta email turns up a phone number that she’s used from the time when she is seen in an online 2009 press release as the media contact for Gore, (full text here) and in an online December 2012 Rockefeller Foundation press release naming her as a media contact at Fenton Communications (bottom of the page, full text here) and also in a more recent September 2014 press announcement about the Clinton Global Initiative – in the version from the National Geographic, she is noted as the media contact, while the twin version at the Waitt Foundation just says “contact.”

What wider problem is possibly indicated from Kreider’s appearance in the Podesta emails? It is at the very least a bit troubling that her resumé shows no employment of any kind between her departure as Al Gore’s spokesperson in July 2012 to her own self-employment at Kreider Strategies, LLC starting in July 2013. But as clearly seen in the screencapture link two paragraphs above, she was hailed in her return to Fenton Communications in June 2012, and was also specifically noted to be in that position by the Rockefeller Foundation six months later. And Fenton is a direct topic in Podesta emails, albeit at this point, in February 2015 at the earliest. Given that Kreider has long associations with Fenton Communications, and is self described as “a consultant to several global non-governmental organizations“, one question to ask is whether she did any consulting on what the above LeftExposed topic was about, namely the “Campaign Against Rupert Murdoch’s Climate Denialism” which in Wikileaks’ DOC file closes out with the line “Submitted December 1, 2014 by David Fenton.”

Kreider’s LinkedIn resumé likely doesn’t include her much more recent United Nations work as the result of neglect. In my first September 2013 post about her, I linked to a resumé version of hers that now no longer functions. The above screencapture links and the direct link to it is from a newer version.

But the potentially central problem within the Podesta email above concerns the level Kreider is at, when John Podesta was Counselor to President Obama, assisting him and the White House Chief of Staff with day-to-day management of White House staff operations …. along with duties that involved “overseeing climate change and energy policy“. Kreider was relaying concerns to Podesta from people at the United Nations who report straight to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

A spokeswoman for Gore told me by e-mail that Heartland is an oil-company-funded group that denies that global warming is real and caused by human activities. (sound familiar?)

That’s essentially the same thing Kreider said over 10 years earlier, not as Gore’s spokesperson, but as Communications Director at Ozone Action (full text here) – again, the place I call the epicenter of the ‘industry corrupted skeptic climate scientists’ accusation.

Dr. Singer has opposed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus document as have coal and oil interests. Dr. Singer is joined by: Dr. Robert Balling who has received over $300,000 from US fossil fuel interests, British and German coal companies and the Kuwaiti government; and Dr. Patrick Michaels who has received at least $167,000 from fossil fuel interests including the German Coal Mining Association.

Dr. Michaels and Balling were part of a public relations experiment in 1991 which purported to “reposition global warming as theory, not fact.”

That later phrase is the infamous leaked memo phrase which has every appearance of being the only so-called evidence to support the accusation that fossil fuel companies paid skeptics to turn the certainty of man-caused global warming back into a “false theory.” One thing about that 1996 Ozone Action press release: it contains zeroreference to Ross Gelbspan, the person that Kreider’s future boss said had discovered that phrase. Not to worry, Kreider solved the problem a year later when she was the Climate Campaign Director for Greenpeace (full text here – and, lest anyone forget, Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer):

PULITZER WINNER’S NEW BOOK DOCUMENTS OIL AND COAL INDUSTRY’S CAMPAIGN TO DERAIL GOVERNMENT ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

… Gelbspan writes that a key component of this misinformation campaign has been the use of industry-funded scientists in the media, government inquiries, and speaking tours. …

… The book reveals that in 1991 a group of power utilities and coal companies hired a public relations firm, which then formed the “Information Council on the Environment.” The ICE’s stated aim was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” …

And as I pointed out at the end of my last blog post, in a reply to a 2015 Tweet about a ‘skeptic climate researcher linked to industry money’, Kreider thanked one of the first reporters who broke the news of Ozone Action’s revelations of so-called ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists, and Gelbspan as well.

From those bits ranging from 1996 to 2015, would there be any reason for Kreider to fail to mention that sort of thing to anybody who will listen to it?

But the bigger question remains, how does a person with such a worthless one-trick pony accusation narrative like that achieve a position separated by only a degree or two from both the President of the United States and the UN Secretary-General?

Thomas Fahr “Tom” Steyer is an American hedge fund manager and philanthropist who is among the world’s wealthiest and largest supporters of radical environmental groups, left-wing causes, and Democratic candidates. Read more…